


fade to black

by kalypsobean



Category: Alan Wake (Video Game)
Genre: Future Fic, Gen, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-25
Updated: 2012-12-24
Packaged: 2017-11-22 08:24:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,012
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/607797
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kalypsobean/pseuds/kalypsobean
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>he thought it wouldn't affect him because he lives it every day. he was wrong.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Asselin](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Asselin/gifts).



i.  
He's trapped and unable to move. The shadows twist and turn around him and he screams.  
They go still, as if they turn to look at him. There is nothing in his hands or his pockets; he feels exposed. They approach him.  
He has to tell himself to breathe because he knows, in the same way he knows he's still alive, that he needs his strength and a lack of air will not help him.

The light turns on. "Alan? What are you doing?"  
He is curled in the corner of his bedroom. He covers his face and starts to rock forward and back. 

He sleeps with the light on, now.

ii.  
His editor keeps asking him for 'something, anything, ten pages even'.  
He protects _Return_ like it is his child; doesn't look at the stack of pages he can't bring himself to touch, not even to burn them. To him, they are empty, without content or meaning except what sounds they make when the windows are open.  
He won't let that happen again. He turns it into a story that talks of redemption; it speaks of home and safety and love like they are things to be treasured and guarded above all else, and he lets his avatar cry when he finds his own eyes are dry.

He still doesn't know how he made it here; he woke up and it was like it they never left, except for her tears and the extra pages in his study that are fixed in his mind though he didn't put them there.

 

iii.  
He goes out to the firing range once a week now; has his own rifle, bought from Wal-Mart on a whim and kept carefully in a lockbox under his side of the bed, the ammo in the bottom drawer of the dresser.  
The targets don't look right; but if he closes one eye and looks through the sight, like he's seen on television, it blurs and for a moment, it's a shadow.  
That's always when he fires.

iv.  
He can't find her.  
He only left for a minute, went out to the car to bring in the last of the shopping and now she's gone. She was in the kitchen, putting the milk in the fridge and humming that damned song (he can't tell her what it does to him, he hates it and it reminds him of then) and now she's not.  
She isn't sitting in her chair. She's not in the bathroom. She isn't in the bedroom.  
She's gone.

He's standing on the back porch and she's at the back door. All the shopping is put away when he goes back inside, everything neatly lined up in the pantry.

v.  
He parts with the first three chapters of _Return_ knowing that they're different. He's changed, somehow, and therefore his writing is altered to fit.  
He jumps every time the characters speak in his mind, looks over his shoulder and then spends a minute with his hands stretched in front of his face, waiting for them to stop shaking. They say things that come from nowhere and bring with them a darkness he's never mined before.  
His editor calls him in the middle of the night to rave and demand more. He wants to say that it's already over; it is done and let him start anew, but something stops him.

If he could tell anyone about it, they would lock him up and throw away the key instead of applauding his sudden new maturity, the next level, a new drive and inspiration.

vi.  
This is it; he's done it, by himself. He knows he should be proud, even relieved, but he's still waiting for something and he knows it's not over. He's always waiting.  
The shadows have started whispering that they want him back, that he has to finish what he started (what they started, before they took her).  
 


	2. Chapter 2

vii.  
His editor recommends he go to Washington. _Return_ reads like it could be set there, but is he sure he's never been? It would be so much better, that little bit richer, if it had a tinge more authenticity. And look what it did for that other novel!  
He can't very well say he's been there and is quite happy to never go back, not when he didn't even know that the place he designed to be anywhere looked like his nightmares. He writes back, saying he's aiming for it to feel more personal, like the reader's backyard, and he'd rather get back to work on the next one.  
The stack of papers still haunts him; he should burn them.

He has his red pen ready, but the proof hasn't come yet. The longer it takes the heavier it weighs on his mind, until it's all he thinks about.   
He doesn't ask himself what he'll do if it doesn't come, if he wakes up and it's still dark.

viii.  
He feels himself falling apart. Sometimes he moves and then finds he hasn't moved at all; he's poured himself a dram of whisky without leaving his desk.  
Alice won't talk to him some days; he finds he misses ignoring her, misses the coffee that appears four times a day and knowing that she's there; she's okay, they're okay.

Dr Kaufmann is different. He has blue eyes and seems to draw the light into him instead of pushing it away; he listens and never says much.  
Alan sits there with Alice's hand on his knee, and he asks how he's supposed to get through this.  
Dr Kaufman says he can't, he just has to live with it, can he draw the darkness and give it a form, a name. It will help.  
He's done that, he says; that's how it started.  
If it's how they started it then that's how he can end it.

Surviving is not as simple as it sounded. He doesn't go back, not for a long time, and then only at midday, only at midsummer, when the only shadows are of things he can see.


End file.
